Below are guest posts and opinions from Armando Aguilar, head of capital formation and growth at Terrahas.
While ETFs may dominate the headlines, the real architect of Bitcoin's liquidity is that miners quietly build their balance sheets. Since half of April 2024, the role of the miners has shifted from pure producers to systemic stabilizers. Miners are making efforts to lock in Bitcoin Native Finance (BTCFI) while institutions celebrate the influx.
This article explores how miners are emerging as financial actors, how balance sheet strategies are deployed, and the BTCFI infrastructure is still lacking for this evolution to be successful.
From hashrate to balance sheet: post-harving pivot
Half of 2024 reduced block rewards and tightened margins across the industry. As a result, many miners had to restructure their businesses not only to survive, but also to manage their capital more accurately. Selling block rewards in the market is no longer content, miners have begun to act like the corporate finance ministry: timing BTC sales, security reserves, and building financial buffers.
As of mid-2025, statistics show that Bitcoin Miner has 104,500 BTC (approximately $12.7 billion), while the corporate Treasury Department added 159,107 BTC in the second quarter alone. What appears to be a passive “hadling” is, in fact, an intentional fluidity strategy. This reduces exposure to short-term volatility in the long term.
This shift is consistent with the aggressive growth of the network scale. By mid-2025, Bitcoin hashrate had skyrocketed above Th/s of 970 million, reaching a year-over-year rate of around 60%. As miners expand their operations, they also expand their financial exposure and treat balance sheet management strategically as well as hashrate optimization.
I've been witnessing a full cycle pivot. Miners are not simply producing bitcoin, they are actively shaping capital markets.
Ministry of Finance's Rated Mining: Three Pillars of Strategy
- collateral: Miners are funding their businesses in opposition to BTC Holdings, rather than diluting fairness. This approach allows for tactical spending without abandoning long-term exposure.
- timing: Some companies are now treating BTC sales like macro trading, maintaining a recession or making profits during rallies. These are well-thought-out structured exit strategies based on clear goals and market signals, not knee movements.
- Fluidity Buffer: Miners do not operate wages ranging from pay to pay. Many have built BTC reserves as a cushion for market stress, giving breathing chambers during network charges and hash competition spikes. Public mining, which maintains transparent BTC holdings and avoids forced sales, is often seen as more stable, strategic and viewed in accordance with institutional expectations.
Naturally, half of 2024 did not create this idea, but certainly accelerated it. Since 2024, these fiscal strategies have become necessary for survival, not just options.
Signaling Power: When miners move through the market
Miners are beginning to intentionally send signals to the broader ecosystems. Holding BTC is more than just a belief in current protocols. That's the message: “This asset is important and we manage it accordingly.”
Markets take note when large public miners slow sales. Their actions now affect sentiment and pricing, just as Central Bank adjusts interest rates. This dynamic was previously a domain of exchange, but no longer existed.
Currently, some countries are investigating BTC for strategic preparation. Chainalysis published a report on the subject earlier this year, pointing out the US, Czech Republic, Switzerland and others among prominent supporters of the idea.
Meanwhile, key names like Saylor's MicroStrategy and Marathon Digital have accumulated and disclosed BTC positions with the same transparency expected of institutional asset managers.
Simply put, when miners behave like the Ministry of Finance, the mining itself changes to institutional capital management, setting the tone of Bitcoin's financial maturation as a global asset. Whether the headline reflects this or not, that's exactly what we're seeing right now.
BTCFI Gap: Infrastructure is still catching up
However, while miners are mature, BTCFI remains fragile. The infrastructure to support this financial class is still underdeveloped.
The settlement remains slow, and confirmation delays limit complexity. The fluidity remains silent throughout the fragmented protocol with minimal adjustments. Instruments are often based on trust and there is a lack of demand for neutral BTC native systems.
The project is constantly experimenting. While practice-free lending protocols, BTC-backed stubcoins and hashrate forwards, most of these tools are in the early stages, far from wider adoption.
This gap between mature miners' behavior and undeveloped protocol infrastructure is dangerous. The stabilization force may be converted to a point of failure without being resolved. If the BTCFI stalls, miners can lose just as credibility as their role becomes essential.
So, here we need the actual infrastructure:
- Cross-protocol interoperability allows miners to efficiently allocate capital between platforms.
- A robust Oracle that reflects true market prices and mining inputs without operational risk.
- An incentive model that rewards transparency and penalizes extraction behavior.
Without these, sanctuaries aimed at stabilizing the system could become systematic debt…
Conclusion: Recognize your role or prepare to fail
Miners didn't seek this role, but they stepped into it. In a system without a central bank, someone has to set up the floor. Today, it is miners who hold reserves, manage risks, and act with systematic foresight.
If BTCFIs do not mature, it is not because of a shortage of miners. That's because they refuse to acknowledge the financial infrastructure that the ecosystem had already built up, and they hold all the actors together.
Pull coat:
“Bitcoin becomes institutional when miners behave like the Treasury, and that's exactly what's happening.
